Ilya Kaminsky

My Mother’s Tango

I see her windows open in the rain, laundry in the windows— she rides a wild pony for my birthday, a white pony on the seventh floor. “And where will we keep it?” “On the balcony!” the pony neighing on the balcony for nine weeks. At the center of my life: my mother dances, yes here, as in childhood, my mother asks to describe the stages of my happiness— she speaks of soups, she is of their telling: between the regiments of saucers and towels, she moves so fast—she is motionless, opening and closing doors. But what was happiness? A pony on the balcony! My mother’s past, a cloak she wore on her shoulder. I draw an axis through the afternoon to see her, sixty, courting a foreign language— young, not young—my mother gallops a pony on the seventh floor. She becomes a stranger and acts herself, opens what is shut, shuts what is open.